21 August

1995: On 21 August 1995, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar died.

An Indian-born astrophysicist, he was a Nobel Laureate in 1983. The term Chandrasekhar's limit shows that those stars which retain an end-of-life mass above a certain limit, collapse. This discovery was contrary to the thinking at the time which assumed that all stars ended their lives as white dwarfs and it subsequently led to the discovery of neutron stars and black holes.